ODSP paperwork

"Having, then, once introduced an element of inconsistency into his system, he was far too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently, and he lapsed ere long into an amiable indifferentism which to outward appearance differed but little from the indifferentism from which Mr. Hawke had aroused him"--The Way of All Flesh

The ODSP sent me a form asking for financial information to make sure my receiving payments was justified.  Unfortunately, they sent it last month but I misplaced the letter, and I only got the information together now!

It turned out that our garden had two more zucchinis.  We gave one to John S., the other to Puitak.

At the memoir group Monday they actually had a topic I couldn't think of anything to write about! (It was "street hockey.")

It looks like we're past the summer's hottest weather.  I like that time of year when September is approaching and it's warm rather than hot.

On Youtube last week I saw a couple of episodes of the early '70s high school show Room 222.  (It had an original musical theme, in seven-fourths rhythm.) I'd forgotten how pretty guidance counsellor Denise Nicholas was!

A filling

"Of course he thought Casabianca's was the noblest life that perished there; there could be no two opinions about that; it never occurred to him that the moral of the poem was that young people cannot begin too soon to exercise discretion in the obedience they pay to their Papa and Mamma.  Oh, no! the only thought in his mind was that he should never, never have been like Casabianca, and that Casabianca would have despised him so much, if he could  have known him, that he would not have condescended to speak to him"--The Way of All Flesh

Wednesday I had lunch with Pam at the Grenadier restaurant in High Park.  The weather was good so we went for a walk afterward.

Friday morning I went to the dentist and got a filling.  Later that day I read in the new Harper's issue an annotation feature by an American whose dental care suffered from lack of funds!

It turned out that longer book excerpts were needed for the magazine, so I typed up some longer ones.  Really, I like having work that takes a lot of time...

In The Way of All Flesh there's a public school headmaster called Skinner.  Is this the origin of Principal Skinner's name on The Simpsons?

I finished translating "Streetcar, Streetcar, Wait for Me" into Korean and started on "Early Morning Rabbits."

I've started reading a Pibgorn story retelling Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (with Pib in the Juliet role).

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

"On a tragedy of that kind [preparing for the wrong things] our national morality is duly silent.  It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed.  The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks.  Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe.  It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle.  It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty"--Howards End

"Perhaps his main strength lay in the fact that though his capacity was a little above the average, it was not too much so.  It is on this rock that so many clever people split. The successful man will see just so much more than his neighbours as they will be able to see too when it is shown them, but not enough to puzzle them.  It is far safer to know too little than too much.  People will condemn the one, though they will resent being called upon to exert themselves to follow the other"--The Way of All Flesh

After reading just over 100 pages of Howards End, I switched to Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh (which arrived in the mail Tuesday). So far, it's about a nouveau riche publisher's son in early 19th-century England being pressured into becoming an Anglican priest.

Wednesday night my History Discussion Group discussed Haiti.

I've been going through some ebooks finding quotes to include in Miriam's The Silver Fox magazine.  They're books about Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True debut, conversations with Joni Mitchell, musical engineer Mark Howard's memoir, and a book about Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD

On John Ruskin's Stones of Venice: "And the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and the love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard's life.  For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and hunger were"--Howards End

Saw Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood this afternoon at the Yonge & Eglinton.  Mixed feelings.  It had several good scenes but it brought out creepy feelings in me.  Like Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, it ends with a cartoonish rewriting of history. (But I always like Brad Pitt.)

I've resumed my story translations.  I finished the French translation of David Lewis Stein's "The Huntsman" and started doing a Korean translation of David Helwig's "Streetcar, Streetcar, Wait for Me."

John finished renovating the bathroom and is now working on the dining room, so lately we've been eating outdoors on our new verandah.  Our garden is now producing beans!  

The other week at quora.com I saw the question "What was the most overlooked event of the Cold War?" and offered this answer:

Ronald Reagan’s 1987 post Iran-Contra decision to reflag Kuwaiti tankers in the Persian Gulf just to get in Iran’s face and assert American power in the Middle East.

What does this have to do with the Cold War? The truth is that in terms of US foreign policy, Reagan didn’t end the Cold War but turned it into something permanent that only required a new enemy in the form of Moslems. This reflagging was a crucial step on the road to:

1. the 1991 war over Kuwait.
2. The devastating twelve-year containment of Iraq, accompanied by a long-term US presence in Saudi Arabia that alienated many well-heeled religious residents and (at the very least) gave Osama bin Laden a convenient pretext for turning against the Americans who had formerly armed him and persuading those alienated Saudis to bankroll him in an anti-American jihad.
3. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
4. The ill-starred US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. In other words, more of the same Cold War policies that enrich the Military-Industrial Complex and deplete the USA’s finances and moral “authority,” while demonstrating the opportunism of leading Republicans and the cowardice of leading Democrats. (The Democrats erred disastrously in 1987, sparing Reagan impeachment and guaranteeing that successors like George W. Bush and Donald Trump would repeat his offences. Are they about to repeat that mistake?) Ronald Reagan was a very bad POTUS and a very bad man. Pray for his worthless soul.

HOWARDS END

"Their house was in Wickham Place, and fairly quiet, for a lofty promontory of building separated it from the main thoroughfare.  One had the sense of a backwater, or rather of an estuary, whose waters flowed in from the invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves without were still beating.  Though the promontory consisted of flats--expensive, with cavernous entrance halls, full of concierges and palms--it fulfilled its purpose, and gained for the older houses opposite a certain measure of peace.  These, too, would be swept away in time, and another promontory would rise upon their site, as humanity piled itself higher and higher on the precious soil of London"--Howards End

Our back yard garden has produced half a dozen magnificent zucchinis!  I've already given away three to friends.

Tuesday I had lunch with Maria and Sergei from my Crowdreads Meetup at the Banjara Eglinton.  I ordered too much and got a doggy bag for the leftover rice and nan bread. (The next day at home, we ate Indian food and added that in.) Later, in the lobby of the Yonge & Eglinton cinema, they introduced me to a game that's like Scrabble but with playing cards, whose name I've already forgotten.  For some reason being with friends wears me out, and I ended up with a headache!

The same day I finished the Haiti history and went to the North York Central library to borrow Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh for my book club.  I found the shelf where it should have been, but it wasn't there! (Stolen?) So I ordered it online from Chapters-Indigo, and it should take a week.

In the meantime, I've started reading E.M. Forster's Howards End for John S.'s book club. I was afraid I wouldn't have time to finish it and would have to watch the movie for the second half, but the event was delayed a month so Bob's your uncle!  I'll read the first part before The Way of All Flesh and the second part after.  I've so far read the first 40 pages and I'm not yet sure what the story's about--I have a feeling it's the sort of story where you read the whole thing, then realize what it's about!  One of the characters was comparing Debussy to Monet--I see him more as Cezanne!